Jake Marsh is a Social Media and Tech Evangelist. He authors a blog about technology, design, and programming at TheJakeMarsh.com.StumbleUpon has been around since 2001, and their tag line boasts “Discover your web” and, truly, that’s what this service does. It provides the unique feature of showing you a random website, anytime, anywhere, and also learns and adapts to your interests, showing you websites specifically tailored to your preferences. Here’s a guide for users of all levels that will help you get the most out of StumbleUpon.

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.The ToolbarThe first thing you’ll need to do after signing up for an account, is download/install the StumbleUpon toolbar. It’s available as a plugin for both Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (No Safari or Google Chrome version just yet). The toolbar includes a few different buttons: The Stumble button, which will give you a new webpage with every click. The Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down buttons, which will add or remove sites from your favorites list, as well as tell StumbleUpon to show you more or less sites like the current one.

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The Share button is used when you want to share pages you’ve found with your friends on StumbleUpon. The Channels section will let you view sites in all the categories and sub-categories. And lastly, some buttons to view your favorites and the favorites of your friends. It’s good to note that the toolbar allows you to favorite things you didn’t even find on StumbleUpon, and your entire list of favorites is saved on your StumbleUpon profile for later.Select Your Interests

One of the best things you can do to help you get the best stumbling experience is to accurately fill out the ‘Manage Interests’ section. By selecting the sublets you prefer, StumbleUpon shows you webpages that you are interested in.Rate Everything!By using the Rating system, StumbleUpon adapts to what you like, making sure that every time you stumble, you’ll see the content you really want to see. The system is pretty smart and if you remember to rate every page you come to, you’ll start seeing less and less stuff you don’t like.Review, Review, Review.

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Along with rating pages, reading and writing reviews will help you determine what sites of similar interests are the ones you really want to visit. A person is usually more inclined to check something out after seeing reviews and a positive rating for the particular item. Think of it kind of like Rotten Tomatoes, but for webpages.Make Some Friends